Sunday 15 June 2003

Pic of the day: Narue, an ordinary half alien girl with dangerously short skirts.

Narue's panties revisited

Actually, the anime is named "Narue's World", or in Japanese: Narue no Sekai. Narue is a girl, whose father just happens to be an alien from outer space. Her sister also arrives, but due to the time dilation when traveling near light speed, the sister is still 12 while Narue is 14, although she wasn't even born when the sister started her voyage ... It only gets more confusing from here. Narue lives with her father, as her mother is dead. Her sister parks her spaceship in the neighborhood and reconfigures it to a house. Except the spaceship is not really hers, it has kinda adopted her ... the spaceship is sentient, female and rather wise, and becomes the series deus ex machina.

The two main characters however are Narue and her boyfriend Kazuto. Since they are both just 14, "boyfriend" is a somewhat tentative title. They like each other a lot, and he is also bodily attracted to her to some degree. That's where the panties come in. Every second episode or so, there is a display of panties. It keeps baffling me, because in almost every other way the series seems to be made for girls. It's not just the title – Narue is the main character. We see her family a lot more than his; they are fairly well developed characters and recurring cast. And the series has a lot more focus on relationship than typical boy anime. Not just boy+girl, although that is the main theme, but relationships in general.

Over the course of 10 episodes, it has gradually dawned on me. Narue no Sekai is a series that aims to educate girls. It shows various aspects of life that they are likely to come into contact with as they grow up. Some are quite realistic, such as boyfriends who admire anime characters (!!). Others are clearly metaphors ... an alien robot who is in love with a human man, for instance, represent one of the harshest taboos in Japanese society, romance with a foreigner. (Japanese are extremely ethnocentric by western standards... the same attitudes here in Norway are generally called "racist".)

Anyway, the panties. It may sound harsh when I say it straight out like this, but I have concluded that they are not there mainly to pull in a male audience. I don't think boys would sit through half an hour of mushy girl stuff just for 3 seconds of panties. Well, most boys wouldn't. I think it is for the girls. Almost every time there is a display of panties – or even a rather large one-piece bathing suit – we also get to see the boys' reaction. The boys blush, sweat, become flustered, or in extreme cases begin to nosebleed. The message is that boys are highly vulnerable to sexual exposure. This is not treated as a bad thing, just as a fact of life. Actually I think it is slightly overdone. Even if a boy likes you, he is not likely to immediately become your boyfriend just because he accidentally gets a good look at your panties. But I guess it doesn't hurt either ... if he is a nice and gentle boy like Kazu-chan, at least.

The series has so far not shown any incidents where men (or women for that matter) are overcome by lust. We do see boys get very flustered and uncomfortable, which is quite another thing. I guess the daily papers, even in Japan, will quite nicely do the job of bringing the other point home. Still ... I hope this series won't encourage barely legal teen girls to use their panties for fun and profit. I don't really think so. Given the spirit of the series as a whole, I think watching it will help girls and even boys feel more secure on their future roles in society, and how to interact with other people. Highly recommended.